(i) Technical Field
The present invention relates to a print document conversion apparatus, a print document conversion method, and a computer readable medium storing a program.
(ii) Related Art
Print data written in a page description language (PDL) such as PostScript (registered trademark) or Portable Data Format (PDF) (published as ISO 32000-1) is converted into a bitmap image (also referred to as a raster image) by a conversion module called a raster image processor (RIP), and is printed by a printer. The conversion module is responsible for language processing such as PDL interpretation, and is generally implemented by software.
However, some of the processes performed by a RIP, such as image processing on a bitmap image object (for example, color space conversion, rotation, and enlargement/reduction), may be executed at a higher speed by using a dedicated hardware-based image processing circuit than by performing software processing using a general-purpose computer. A system in which a software-based RIP module requests a hardware-based image processing circuit to perform image processing has been proposed.
Also, the recent growth of multi-core processors may make it possible to parallelize RIP software to run on multiple processor cores to increase the processing speed. In a configuration in which the number of hardware-based image processing apparatuses is smaller than the number of processor cores on which RIP software is parallelized to run, when a certain RIP software task among the RIP software tasks executed in parallel requests an image processing apparatus to perform image processing, the request may not necessarily be processed immediately if all the image processing apparatuses have already started processing other requests. While a RIP software task waits for processing performed by an image processing apparatus to be completed, the processor that executes the RIP software task is in a wait state without performing processing.